Who Invented Google?

Who Invented Google? Google was invented by two Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, while they were studying computer science at Stanford University in California. These future tech titans came to create the world’s most popular search engine via very different paths.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who invented google, created Google's original homepage with a simple design. The simple homepage became part of the company's image as being uncluttered and efficient.

Larry Page was born into a family of computer geeks in East Lansing, Michigan in 1973. His parents were professors of computer science at Michigan State University. His father, Carl, is a pioneer in artificial intelligence. Larry grew up as computers were making the leap from large mainframes to the desktop. Apple introduced its groundbreaking Apple II personal computer in 1977.

Sergey Brin was born in 1973 to Jewish parents in Moscow, Russia. The family immigrated to the United States when Sergey was six years old because of anti-Semitism. His father Michael, a mathematician, had been forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer because he was barred from graduate school due to his religion.

The Brin family settled in Maryland, where Michael became a university professor and his wife, Eugenia, works as a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Sergey studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park, graduating with honors in 1993.

He went on pursue his doctorate at Stanford, where he met Page during an orientation session for new students in 1995. The pair became close friends, and they soon were working together on developing a new system for searching the World Wide Web, which at that time was composed of 10 million documents.

Existing search engines ranked websites based on the number of times a search term appeared on their pages. Brin and Page developed a new technology called PageRank that evaluated a website based on the number of pages in it, the relative importance of those pages, and the number of links from other websites. A crawler catalogued the contents of each website, with the data fed into a computer algorithm.

Brin and Page originally ran the search engine, called BackRub, out of their dorm room at Stanford using the university’s server. The service quickly outgrew both the room and servers. In 1998, they formed a company called Google. The name is a play on the word googol, the term used to describe the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

They initially operated Google out of their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California. The company grew rapidly, and the phrase “to Google” was added to the American lexicon. In 2004, Brin and Page became billionaires when Google went public. By 2011, each had an estimated net worth of $16.7 billion. So now you you know who invented Google, why it was invented and how Google got it's name!

Brin and Page are big supporters of space exploration. Their company is sponsoring the $30 million dollar Google Lunar X PRIZE, a race to land the first privately-funded rover on the lunar surface. Brin also has put down a $5 million deposit for a trip into space with Space Adventures. His flight could involve a voyage to the International Space Station or to the moon.